I’ve always loved ajax forms that auto-complete as you type in them. Today I added that functionality to the members search bar. Hopefully this will make locating friends faster. Enjoy

It’s sad how parents go overboard when their kids are involved in sports. Here’s a collection of videos of soccer/hockey moms acting crazy on the sidelines.

Stumble It!

continuar…

Chris Wick was kind enough to let me know of some small bugs that he came across on textReminders this week. Amoung those he found was an incorrect date when editing a reminder, profile image overlap and the inability to add non-member friends to a contact list. So I fixed those and also added a “tell a friend” widget, and a “send a free text reminder” form right on the homepage. Last, but not least, I fixed a problem people were having when uploading a new profile picture.

I love fixing problems like this, because it means that the site is improving. Most of the major issues on the site have been address, and now it’s just a matter of squashing the little bugs that pop up. Now that doesn’t mean that there aren’t areas for improvement. In fact, next week I’m going to restructure the way reminders are handled, so that you reliably get your messages on time.

I’m also going to redo the “inbox” areas, so that it’s easy to send private messages back and forth through the site. If you like where the sites going, leave a comment or use the “tell a friend” widget.

Today we released the new look for the text reminders site. It’s a gray color scheme with a number of navigational improvements. As with any change that affects the entire site, bugs are bound to occur because of it. My goal is to do a bit more testing to make sure things are up to par. Let me know if you find things that are working improperely.

I’m not sure what led me to poke around twitters site today (Nov 27th, at around 7pm EST), but as I wondered around the Twitter API page, I found an unusual looking banner had replaced the normal Twitter logo. Apparently a group called the “Heu Ris Ric” is responsible for penetrating twitter.com’s security system and uploading a self-promoting banner. The web address given in the banner seems to read, ” RealIrFaz.com” but doesn’t resolve to an actual domain.

While the the “Heu Ris Ric” hacking skills are impressive, their photoshop skills leave something to be desired.

At 5 hours late, Twitter replaced the hacked banner with their own logo. However the banner still exists on their server! http://apiwiki.twitter.com/f/twitterapi_logo.png?ts=1228008926

Well, I’m very excited because I just fixed an annoying issue which was causing some major performance problems. Let me explain… All day I’ve been wondering why the “create new reminders”, and “manage your reminders” pages were loading so slowly. Going through the code this evening, I noticed that those two page were calling some un-necessary files. By removing that call, I saw load time dramatically improve. It turns out that the page it was calling wasn’t even on the server, so that’s what all the hold up was!

Anyway, things are much more speedy now!

I just upgraded our server from a shared hosting platform to a VPS (Virtual Private Server). This will affect the site in two ways.
1) Improved uptime, and hopefully faster server performance
2) No limit as to how many text messages can be sent out from the site.

This removes some of the scalability issues the site has been facing. The downside however is that I’m now being charged $25 a month for hosting. While this isn’t a HUGE financial strain, it’s a burden none the less. Therefore I’ll be looking for a way to monetize the site at least to where I can break even.

I’m not sure what form this will take, but whatever it is, I’ll do my best to be as non-intrusive as possible.

As the site gets more and more stable, my attention turns to usability. These past few days have been focused on the list creation functionality, and today I finally brought that to the forefront by giving it it’s own right nav box on the members page.

I’ve also added a little text box on the left nav to make it easy for members to update their bio information.

ok. I’ve been working at making threads on profile notes all day. What I mean by this is, currently when someone writes your a profile note, you click “reply to note” and you are taken to their profile page to leave a note for them. Now the problem is that there is no way to follow the conversation unless you go back and forth between pages. So I’m trying to make a conversation thread that will allow you to see all the replys without going back and forth. That’s what supposed to happen. But that’s not what I got working.

At this point I’ve gotten most of the functionality working, but it’s not showing up “who” wrote the note, once you get a few replys deep. It’s really, really annoying, and I’m probably going delete everything I’ve coded up to this point and start clean. grr.

So today I work up to the textReminders site being down.

It was down from about 3am EST to 9am EST. I’m sure if I had alerted them to the issue earlier, it would have been revolved faster, but what can I say, I can’t monitor the site 24 hours a day. Well I could, but then I wouldn’t have a very high quality of life would I.

So the site gets back up, but I don’t have cpanel support for another 8 hours. (For those who don’t know, cpanel is an admin tool that allows me to manage the database & other things).

Long story short the site is back up and running on all cylenders. Text Messages are going out on time, and everything looks good atm.

I’m seriously considering getting a dedicated server so stuff like this doesn’t happen. It’s only $25/mo, so if I can get a site sponsor that’ll pays at least $25 a month I’ll do it. e-Marketing 101 will tell you that more traffic to your site means you can charge a higher price for advertising. So hopefully the site will grow to the point where I can have 1 or 2 sponsors cover the sites expenses without having to show annoying ads everywhere. I’m not going to say that ads will never appear on the site, but I truely despise how Myspace has whored itself out to advertisers like it has. Facebook has done a “slightly” better job of having ads, but keeping the annoyance level tolerable. TextReminders is going to find a way to monatize the site without hammer visitors with ads or charging for the server. Frankly, I use the site more then anyone else, and I can’t stand ads.

I’m not sure how the the discussion veered away from poor hosting to advertising, but it has - ah well.